30 Days of Clean Eating: Week 1 Progress Report

Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend and enjoying this fantastic Atlanta weather. Weather that is this nice makes me want to be outside 24/7 and gets me so excited for spring and summer time. These seasons always put me in the mood to eat healthy and fresh foods all the time, which is perfect for my clean eating quest this month.

So this morning I woke up and made my way to Your DeKalb Farmers Market to pick up some super fresh produce. This was my first time to go to this farmers market, or any farmers market for that matter. Let me tell you, this place is awesome. It was overwhelming in the best kind of way. It is basically a huge warehouse with rows and rows of fresh fruits and veggies, fresh spices, fresh baked goods (which I managed to stay away from), flowers, baking supplies, coffees, nuts, and anything else you could ever want. The produce is very fresh and less expensive than the average grocery store. I basically fell in love with this place and plan on making it a weekly routine. It was really hard for me to stick to my grocery list, but I was able to stay well within my budget and got all of my produce (which is a lot), a big thing of quinoa, a big thing of lentils and all of the spices I don’t have already for the week. If you love food as much as I do I would definitely suggest checking it out as soon as possible! But my one suggestion is to go during the week; it was a total mad house today which made it a little hard to peruse the great selections of everything they have.

Okay now it is time for my first week of clean eating progress report! So far this experience has been pretty great. Once I got over that two day funk at the start of the week, my energy levels have been way up and I feel really fantastic.

Sweet potatoes are my new favorite sweet treat

One of the other side effects of eating clean I have experienced is that I am sleeping so much better. It used to take me so long to fall asleep at night (maybe due to my nighttime sweets habit) but this week I feel asleep so much faster after getting into bed. This was not a change I was expecting but I am so happy about it.

Another benefit to eating clean is that I have actually lost a couple of pounds this week. I know that a lot of that has to be from my body detoxing out the processed foods and me starting to exercise more regularly, but it is a side effect I would love to keep happening. It is almost swimsuit season after all! I will keep y’all posted about any other side-effects that might happen this next week.

I also learned a couple of things this week. The first thing I learned is that I can not eat a whole pot of beans in one week. It is not possible. So now I know I don’t need to make nearly as many as I did last week. The second thing I have learned is that soup is the absolute easiest thing to take to work for lunch. I plan on eating a lot of soup for lunch this week, as you can see in my meal plan below. Lastly, I have learned that I can survive without red wine. Which was previously thought to be impossible by many.

Now I am going to get in the kitchen and make some big batches of food to eat throughout this week. Also, my meal plan for the week is looking so delicious, I included it below. I hope you all have a great Sunday and didn’t forget about the time change! And as usual, feel free to shoot me an email at lstroud@bestselfatlanta.com if you have any tips, questions or recipes!